Archive
Call for Submissions: Journaling the Apocalypse
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses’ cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
—Robert Graves, “The Cool Web”
Autumn is upon us here in Quebec and central Pennsylvania. With it comes the third anniversary of qarrtsiluni, launched in late August 2005 originally as a place for literary and other bloggers to slow down and together try to create something of lasting value. We hesitated to call this bloggish, continuously published collection of themed anthologies a magazine at first, since it didn’t much resemble the established online literary magazines. Three years later, some of the early contributors have moved on, but many more have joined us — poets, writers, photographers, videographers, and artists of every description — to the point where our guest editors struggle to keep up with the influx of astonishingly high-quality submissions every two months. Things have changed a lot since the last time either one of us has been part of an editorial team, so we decided we’d better reacquaint ourselves with the process. What better way to mark the anniversary than for Beth and Dave to step out from behind the curtain and handle all the editing ourselves for the space of an issue?
The theme this time is Journaling the Apocalypse. Submissions are open now through the 6th of October, and we expect to begin posting around the beginning of October, after the present issue has concluded. (We are slowly adjusting to the idea that issues may need two and a half or three months to unfold, instead of just two.)
Our theme choice is a bit of a nod to qarrtsiluni’s roots in the literary/personal blog world, where journaling and journalism often merge. We’re used to thinking of apocalypse in terms of an indefinitely delayed doom, a Ragnarok. But in its original Christian milieu, it may have meant something far more immediate: Yeshua ben Yosef was apparently fond of saying that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” and the New Testament Greek word apokalypsis meant simply the uncovering of a pre-existent truth or state of being. Francis Ford Copolla canonized this notion for a secular age in his reimagining of Heart of Darkness: Apocalypse Now. Especially in the last hundred years, apocalypses of one sort or another — war, genocide, ecocide, nuclear armageddon — have been woven into the fabric of our common nightmares, and now, faced with the evidence of accelerating global climate change, we sense that even our gloomiest prophecies may have been too optimistic.
If humanity — and the earth — survive the next hundred years, people will wonder: how could we have lived like this? How could we have borne the knowledge that we were bringing disaster upon ourselves and still continued to consume? What was it like to live through a slow-motion cataclysm? For this issue, we’re soliciting original writing, video, music, art and photography created in response to this self-destructive prophetic fire at the heart of our civilization — or any civilization (and there are many) with end-of-time myths. We’re not looking for grand syntheses, but concrete and intimate portraits of the earth’s inhabitants and landscapes as they approach ground zero. We hasten to add that light-hearted submissions are welcome too: sometimes humor is the quickest way to unveil unpleasant truths, and it can be a good survival mechanism, too.
Please limit submissions of poetry to five poems, and keep prose below 3000 words per essay or story. We encourage artists and photographers to send submissions of a half-dozen or more still images, since those don’t take nearly as long for us to evaluate.
Presuming the CERN supercollider doesn’t create a black hole that swallows the earth when it starts up the day after tomorrow, we’re planning to branch out into some exciting new ventures over the next year. We hope you’ll stick around.
—Dave Bonta and Beth Adams
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Call for Submissions: Transformation
Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing
—Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Sir Samuel Garth, trans.)
We interrupt this program — our fabulous Water issue, which will run for another week and a half — to announce the theme of the next issue: Transformation. Submissions are now open. Be sure to read our general guidelines as well as the following description from the issue editors, Allan Peterson and Jessamyn Smyth:
Like Ovid, we both find transformation to be a basic fact, often taken for granted or overlooked. In myth, legend, art, and everyday life, shape-shifting metamorphosis is an essential feature of creation. The dynamic processes of transfiguration create moments of epiphany which transform our experience. Our bodies themselves — perhaps our most expressive metaphor — are intimate witness to its effect. We are looking for work exploring transformative instances of all kinds with an emphasis particularly on the change itself — the dynamics inside the chrysalis rather than a static image of the butterfly emerged; the moment of Daphne becoming a laurel. We look forward to seeing your work in whatever media and style says it best.
The editors prefer to limit poetry/prose/video/other to two entries per submission. There’s no limit on length this time, but shorter works stand a better chance. There’s also no limit on the number of still images that may be included in a submission, but read the guidelines and choose carefully. Query the editors on special media/ formats before submitting. Second submissions are O.K., but please wait until after notification from the issue editors regarding the first. The deadline is July 31.
Please note that for this issue we are extending the turn-around time to 20 days in order to accommodate the editors’ summer travel plans, so if you’d like to allow time for a second submission before the deadline, don’t delay in submitting the first. Readers should begin seeing the first posts of the new issue sometime in the third week of July, we hope.
The editors for this issue are, as always, past contributors to the magazine. Allan Peterson is a poet and visual artist living in both Florida and Oregon. He is the author of two full-length books of poetry: All the Lavish in Common (Juniper Prize 2005) and Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Prize), as well as four chapbooks. His poetry has appeared widely in print and online in such magazines as Agni, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many others. He has received fellowships from the NEA and The State of Florida and been nominated eight times for Pushcart Prizes. A featured selection of poems and visual art is available in the current issue of Panhandler, here [PDF]. Allan’s numerous contributions to qarrtsiluni over the past six months are here.
Jessamyn Smyth (website) is a writer in all genres. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and recognized in Best American Short Stories 2006; her plays have been produced by Naked Theatre Northampton, Arena Civic Theater, The Shea Theater’s Festival of New Work, The Country Players, and others; her essays have aired on Public Radio; and her poetry and short prose have appeared in various electronic and print journals. Jessamyn earned an MFA from Goddard College and has received grants from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and the Vermont Community Foundation. She’s had a number of teaching gigs over the past few years, and created her own production company, Basilisk, as a means for getting independently produced multi-genre work by local artists into the community. She is presently at work on a novel, a novella series, and a collection of poetry. She’s been a qarrtsiluni contributor since last fall.
We look forward to hearing from past contributors and newcomers alike. Last month we passed the milestone 200th contributor, and readership continues to climb. We had considered taking the summer off, as we did last year, but we’re simply having too much fun right now. We figure qarrtsiluni can tag along with our readers on their summer vacations, appearing on laptops, mobile phones, or in MP3 players — via the website, email subscriptions, or feed readers — at campgrounds, beaches, and backyards all over the northern hemisphere. Where digital publishing is concerned, transformation is very much at the heart of what we do. Come morph with us!
—Dave Bonta and Beth Adams
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Call for Submissions: Water
Happy May Day! We’re excited to announce a new bimonthly theme of both timeless and topical interest: Water. Here’s how the guest editors describe it:
Water is the moving skin of our planet, the most part by far of our bodies; we drink it, we bathe in it, we waste it and taint it, we may yet again wage wars for it. In all its forms — saved in vessels, falling as rain, fountains from rock, wells and springs, woodland pools, rivers, streams and oceans — we invite you to explore water’s depths, and to lose yourselves in the looking-glass world of its reflecting surfaces, to acquaint yourselves with the natural creatures and supernatural beings that are born from and live in it: mysterious ladies, merpeople, nixes and naiads, undines and kelpies…
Ponder the preciousness of water, the rituals and sacred places that attach to it, its properties and prohibitions (can witches cross water?), its power to calm and to cleanse, to refresh and to destroy. The first separation from it is central to many creation myths; we cross over it, under it or, when parted, through it to reach the next life, new lands, new worlds.
Stirred up, left to settle, filtered, channelled — we await some deep, sparkling, refreshing responses.
Though the Nature in the Cracks issue will continue through May 7, submissions to the new issue are now open. The deadline is May 31. The editors suggest a 1000-word limit for essays or stories and a two-poem limit for submissions of poetry this time. As always, we welcome submissions of prose, poetry, images, video and audio; see the How to Contribute page for more details on how and where to send them.
Photo by Arturo Lomas Garza
The editors are both regular contributors to qarrtsiluni, and each has had some work rejected (as have almost all our regulars), so they’re well acquainted with our editorial style. They are also each proficient photographers as well as writers, and combine a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts with a strong interest in the natural world.
Lucy Kempton is British, living in Brittany with husband and dog, and sometimes teaching English. She blogs at box elder — subtitled “meanderings of a displaced dilettante” — and the microblog Out with Mol. She also supplied the photographs for an online project called Compasses, in a call-and-response pattern with the travel sonnets of British blogger Joe Hyam.
Katherine Durham Oldmixon is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Huston-Tillotson, an historically Black university on Austin’s East Side. A poet active in the community, she also serves on the board of Texas Folklife, is the current president of Austin Poetry Society and is a Research Associate of the Humanities Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. She and Arturo Lomas Garza blog about their artistic projects, many of which are collaborations, at Katudi Artists Collaboration.
As always, we look forward to hearing from past contributors and newcomers alike. We’re still a little surprised, and greatly honored, that so many gifted artists and writers have chosen to share their work with us. We’re especially grateful to everyone who has made qarrtsiluni a regular part of their daily or weekly reading. Thanks, and have a great spring!
—Dave Bonta and Beth Adams
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Call for Submissions: Nature in the Cracks
Spring is almost here in many parts of the northern hemisphere, though you might not know it from the fresh snow blanketing much of the northeastern U.S. this morning. Here at qarrtsiluni, we are once again sitting in the darkness, waiting for submissions to an intriguing new theme: Nature in the Cracks. The guest editors write:
We’re seeking prose, poetry, and artwork that celebrates the nature of the world revealed by time, weather, decay, cycle, and neglect. It’s the understated beauty of the stain inside a teacup, not the ornate pattern decorating the porcelain. It’s a sadness for old barns slouching in fog, the branch you accidentally break that turns the owl’s moon face your direction. It’s the liver spots on your grandmother’s forearm, the crooked curl of her fingers over the rocker arm. It’s the well-worn patch of wood stain faded smooth there.
“Nature in the Cracks” also celebrates the patience and necessity of cycles. Water from a warm season must seep into an invisible fissure along the boulder before freezing and expanding to open the crack wider. Leaf litter collects there and moss takes hold before any errant maple seed helicopters in. How many seasons must this cycle repeat before enough decay has collected to sprout a seed?
It’s in the cracks where nature adjusts, changes, and teems, a marginal place that exists without borders, physical or theoretical, a place where something new might evolve out of the muck. “Nature in the Cracks” seeks writing about wildness found in strange places — from landfills to prisons, sidewalk cracks to salad crispers.
As always, see the How to Contribute page for more details. The suggested word limit for text contributions is 2000 words, and the deadline for submissions is March 31.
The editors for this issue hail from opposite ends of the United States, but they share a strong affinity for wildernesses both real and figurative. Brent Goodman — who just made his qarrtsiluni debut with two poems in the last issue — lives in northern Wisconsin, and goes fishing and kayaking every chance he gets. His poetry has appeared in a number of print and online magazines, from Poetry to Rattle to The Cortland Review, and he’s published two chapbooks. His first full-length collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, was recently accepted for publication by Black Lawrence Press. Ken Lamberton is based in Tucson, Arizona, but is spending an extended weekend in the Mojave Desert as this announcement goes to virtual press. Ken has published more than 100 nature articles and essays — including two in qarrtsiluni — and four books, including Wilderness and Razor Wire, which won the coveted John Borroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing in 2002. Ken won a 2007 Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Institute to complete and promote his latest book, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment. We are pleased and honored to have two such accomplished writers on board as we thread a course through this great turning of the year.
— Dave Bonta and Beth Adams
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Call for Submissions: Hidden Messages
Happy 2008! As usual with these bimonthly notes, we have several changes and additions here we’d like to tell you about. But we’re most excited about the new theme. Here’s how the guest editors describe it.
The world is full of hidden messages, real and imagined: the letter concealed in the stem of a pen, the meeting place coded into a newspaper ad, information sailors derive from the weather, destinies astrologers divine from the stars, art drawn on the walls of catacombs, the farmer who finds signs in the behavior of livestock, the teenager who hears joy or doom in the seemingly random order of radio songs, people speaking freely among strangers who don’t know their language, the vast distance between what is meant and what is said.
This issue of qarrtsiluni is interested in hidden messages: the ways they’re concealed, the moments they’re revealed. The “messages” we’ll collect for the issue can come in any form: poetry, story, painting, photograph, essay, fragment, memory, code, and, for the first time, film.
Does our world conceal a great secret, or is it always struggling to speak? What hidden messages have you found? What do you dream of finding? What messages have you concealed?
A hidden message is different from a secret: by definition, a message necessitates a recipient, an audience, a listener. In qarrtsiluni’s Hidden Messages issue, we want the qarrtsiluni community to become the discoverers and decoders of a new collection of hidden wisdom, confessions, beauty and truth.
The suggested word limit for text contributions is 2000 words this time. Contributions from visual artists are also encouraged, as mentioned, and we’ve expanded the range of media we publish to include audio and short film. See the How to Contribute page for more details.
We’ve moved the deadline for this issue from the middle of the second month to the end of the first: January 31. It’s possible that we’ll extend it, but please don’t count on that. We’re also now asking people to wait two weeks between submissions to a given theme. We want to keep the volume of submissions low enough that our volunteer editors don’t feel overwhelmed, and can give each submission the attention it deserves.
The editors for this issue are, as usual, past contributors, so they’re familiar with our general editorial style. Both are what the publishing industry likes to refer to as “emerging writers,” and both are from the American Midwest, relocated to opposite coasts. Dana Guthrie Martin lives and writes in the Seattle area, and has been a catalyst for several online and collaborative poetry projects. Her poetry has appeared in Fence and is forthcoming in Canopic Jar. Carey Wallace lives in New York, and is working on a new novel about the invention of the typewriter.
- You might have noticed that the links for Dana and Carey’s names above go to author tag pages local to qarrtsiluni. One of the trade-offs we make for the convenience and security of WordPress.com hosting is the annoyance of tag and category links at the ends of posts taking people off-site to global tag pages. Just within the past few days, however, we’ve finished adding author tags to all the posts in the archive, which has allowed us to redo the Index of Contributors so that each name there is hotlinked to a local tag page: a new page in qarrtsiluni containing all the posts from that contributor. So if you’ve been published here more than once, you now have a single link you can put in the sidebar of your blog or website, or anywhere else you want to share your publication credits.
We have a couple other new ways for people to spread the word about qarrtsiluni, detailed on the Cache page. (Dave can vouch for the quality of the white t-shirt, the ballcap, and the large mug.) Qarrtsiluni has a group page on Facebook that anyone can join. And we’ve added a news feed on Twitter that you can bookmark if you’d like to get these updates more often than once every two months. We include news about past contributors, so be sure to keep us informed of anything you think the readership should know about: a new book, a major literary award, or the like.
We’re grateful to be part of a vibrant and growing community of writers and artists on the web, and we hope you’ll continue to include qarrtsiluni among your regular online destinations this year. We wish you all a peaceful, joyous, and creative New Year.
—Dave Bonta and Beth Adams
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Call for Submissions: Insecta
We’re pleased to announce a new issue and an intriguing new theme, Insecta. Here’s how the guest editors describe it:
We live in a kingdom of insects. Glancing from the infinitesimally small fairyfly to the giant stick insect, we find that this is a weird and various world. The catalogue of nocturnal moths, thrips, butterflies, caddisflies, angel insects, snow fleas, bristletails, mayflies, silverfish, and bugs is endless and the names evocative.
For this issue of qarrtsiluni, we are interested in art — poem, painting, story, nonfiction, photograph — inspired by insects. We are equally interested in writing about insects, being just as enamored by Thoreau’s ant battle in Walden as Frost’s butterflies, “Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above, / Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.”
We expect a wild variety of explorations on this subject, with work undergoing that mysterious metamorphosis of revision, to be finally shined up to a high beetle-like polish. In insects, the final step in transformations leads to the fully-formed imago — Latin plural, imagines.
There’s a 1500-word limit for prose this time, and a 50-line limit for poems. Please include no more than four poems or six images per submission, and wait two weeks after your first submission before sending a second. Submissions will be considered until December 15, for publication throughout November and December. For the rest of our submission guidelines, see the How to Contribute page.
The editors for this issue are two of the hardest working writers we know. Ivy Alvarez (website, blog) is an Australian poet currently living in Cardiff, Wales. She’s the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press, 2006), and recently received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and Academi to write poems for her second manuscript. In addition to poetry, she also writes plays, reviews and articles. Her co-editor, Marly Youmans (website, blog) is the author of seven books: four novels or novellas, two fantasies set in the Southern Appalachians, and a collection of poems, Claire (Louisiana State University Press, 2003). A native of the Carolinas, she lives in Cooperstown, New York.
- In other news, we’ve added an expanded copyright statement to the submission guidelines, asserting the acquisition of one-time and non-exclusive anthology rights. In addition, we attempted to clarify our position on previously blogged material:
In general, submissions of writing should not have been previously blogged or published elsewhere, though we do make exceptions for pieces that appeared in the author’s own blog, if the appearance was temporary or of an earlier draft.
While we do want qarrtsiluni to be a repository of original writing, we also want to encourage the growth of a literary blogging culture, so writers shouldn’t feel that they can’t submit something simply because an earlier version of it appeared on their blog.
We welcome feedback on these changes, and any other critiques or suggestions you might have.
–Beth Adams and Dave Bonta
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A Note from the Editors
The blog form is now ten years old. How better to celebrate that anniversary than with a “Greatest Blog Hits” issue? From now through our deadline of June 15, we’re reversing our long-standing prohibition against previously blogged material: we want ONLY previously blogged material, at least one year old. It may take any form – fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, photography, audio, cartoons – and there’s no restriction on length (though excerpts will also be considered). We simply want your best posts.
The editors for this issue are Peter of Slow Reads blog and Dave Bonta of Via Negativa (also one of the two managing editors of qarrtsiluni). This theme is a natural outgrowth of our own blogging: both of us have “best of the blogs” sidebar columns on our sites, and we share an interest in rescuing great posts from the near-oblivion of blog archives. We each have our own favorites that we’ll be looking to get permission to republish, but there are a hell of a lot of well-written blogs out there, and we can’t possibly read them all. So please help us out by circulating this notice far and wide and encouraging other literary, artistic, or simply thoughtful bloggers to exhume their best posts and send them our way.
For this edition, we’ll accept submissions of links to work that is still on the web; otherwise, see our guidelines. As always, please direct all correspondence to qarrtsiluni [at] gmail [dot] com.
A Note from the Editors
CLARIFICATION (March 6): Contributors need not respond solely to images in the gallery, but we must be able to either reproduce or link to an image. If the image you’re responding to is copyrighted and it’s not already on the web, you’d have to get permission from the artist for us to reproduce it.
- We’re pleased to open the March-April edition of qarrtsiluni by welcoming the new guest editors, Pica – writer, bird-lover, and calligrapher extraordinaire of Feathers of Hope, and Lori Witzel, the gifted photographer, artist and poet behind Chatoyance. It’s very appropriate that they’ve teamed up for the new theme, Ekphrasis, which means “poetry in dialogue with visual art.” Here’s what they have to say about it:
“This qarrtsiluni theme pairs submissions in poetry, or poetic prose, with a form of visual art. Ideally they need not be by the same person: this is a collaborative experiment. Non-bloggers are particularly encouraged to participate. Find a partner whose work you admire and have at it!
The visual art contributions will be posted in our gallery [link removed at completion of issue] awaiting writers – check back often over the next two weeks, as we will have more to share.
All work, visual and otherwise, will be reviewed and juried by the editors before publishing. Poems should be no longer than 30 lines; prose pieces should be no longer than 500 words. Image files should be a maximum of 500 pixels in width.”
Submissions for Ekphrasis are now officially open; please see our newly revised How to Contribute page for the nitty-gritty details of how to submit your work. The deadline is April 15.
–Beth Adams and Dave Bonta, managing editors
Come Outside!
Welcome to qarrtsiluni, and Happy New Year to all our readers and contributors! We’re looking forward to an exciting 2007 and are happy to announce that the theme for January-February will be “Come Outside,” guest-edited by Fiona Robyn of A Small Stone.
Fiona invites your submissions with the description that follows. (For the nitty-gritty details on how to submit, click on How to Contribute in the sidebar.)
Come outside. Put on your coat, leave your comfortable home. Outside there is weather, the generous sun, the lonely stars. Outside there are gardens, with slugs and poppies and last night’s half-empty wine glasses. Outside there are tangled forests, wide rivers, fields of corn. Outside there is a boy kicking a can across the street, and an old lady talking to herself at the bus stop.
I’m looking for words or pictures that will transport me to where you are. I’m looking for work that shows attention to detail, that is pared down to the bone — something that will shock me a little. I can’t wait to see what you’ve got for me.
Send your submissions through right away — they’ll be considered until February 15th, for publication throughout January and February. A shorter-than-usual word limit of 1000 words, please.
Since this theme lends itself equally to visual responses, we invite submissions of photographs, drawings, paintings and other images — especially those which are perhaps a less-than-literal interpretation of “Come Outside.”
–Beth Adams and Dave Bonta, managing editors
A Word from the Guest Editors
First time. There’s a first time for everything. The obvious: first kiss, first love, first sex. The first day of school. Less obvious: first time around the block, first poem, first loss, first Christmas you remember. This first time for everything theme is wide open, so we don’t want to limit you with our suggestions. Surprise us!
We are looking for memoir and essay, for poetry, fiction, photography, artwork. For a form that perhaps we’d be seeing for the very first time.
Submissions may begin immediately and will be considered through December 15, for publication throughout November and December. The word limit remains at 3,000.
— Tom Montag and Kasturi Mattern
qarrtsiluni 